Recently, with the aging of population and the declining of fertility rate, the social structure and lifestyle in Taiwan are changing significantly. According to a survey conducted by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics of Taiwan, dual-income families currently make up 54.47% of the household population. On work days, therefore, many people leave their homes unattended, or the young and the elderly are left home alone. Under such circumstances, domestic security has become a major concern for not a few homeowners. In addition, statistics of the Directorate-General show that an average of 881 thefts occur each year per 100 thousand households in Taipei City; that is to say, 6.5 homes on average are stolen each day. In light of the above, it is an important goal in domestic security to enable a homeowner away from home to monitor the conditions at home in real time.
While the market has been supplied with a variety of remote surveillance systems, none of them are convenient to use, which explains why they have yet to be widely accepted. For example, Chunghwa Telecom once launched the “Clairvoyance Remote Surveillance System”, which uploads real-time images of the inside of a home to a cloud server through IP cameras and a household broadband network so that the user (e.g., the homeowner or an apartment manager) can view the images in real time through a computer or smartphone. Similar safety surveillance systems were also available from SunForce Technologies Inc., SOPSYS Corp., and so on. As these surveillance systems only serve to upload images from IP cameras to a cloud serer in real time, one who wishes to check on the conditions at home has to view the surveillance images of each IP camera in order to know the current status of any particular person at home. For instance, in order to know the current conditions of a child at home, the user may begin by viewing the surveillance images of the study, the bedrooms, and the hallways while the child is, in fact, playing in the living room, whose surveillance images, however, may not be viewed by the user until the study, the bedrooms, and the hallways are searched in vain. In short, this kind of surveillance systems upload surveillance images only “passively”, without real-time knowledge of the actual location of each person within the surveillance area, which can cause great inconvenience to the user during the image viewing/screening process.
Aside from inconvenience of use, the aforesaid surveillance systems have two more problems which are difficult to overcome and which consequently prevent the prevalence of such systems, as detailed below.
(1) High costs of installation: The installation costs are high because, in order to obtain the surveillance images of each part of the surveillance area (e.g., the study, the bedrooms, the hallways, etc.), it is imperative that each part of the surveillance area be provided with a monitoring device (e.g., an IP camera). The user must also take into account the indoor environment and eliminate any blind spots when installing the surveillance system; otherwise, the system may not produce the expected results. The installation of such surveillance systems, therefore, is far from easy for ordinary users.
(2) Heavy loads on servers: As the foregoing surveillance systems are configured to upload surveillance images to cloud servers in real time to allow users to view the images whenever desired, the processing performances and storage capacities of the cloud servers are subject to very strict requirements in order for the cloud servers to provide the intended functions. Consequently, the maintenance and management of the cloud servers present a huge problem to the service providers of such surveillance systems.
According to the above, the existing surveillance systems are disadvantaged by “inconvenience of use”, “high installation costs”, and “heavy server loads”. In particular, the conventional systems' incapability to proactively obtain the actual location of each person in the surveillance area is the reason why users have to spend a lot of time screening the images and is therefore the key problem that hinders “real-time surveillance”. The issue to be addressed by the present invention is to design a novel system structure which can obtain the real-time location data of each person in the surveillance area and thereby provide convenient, real-time, and effective remote monitoring services.